Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 279, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

I went into the office this morning.  I’ve been reading Janet Evanovich’s sixth book in the Stephanie Plum adventure series, “Hot Six.”  I will be done with it very soon.  I am only one dozen titles behind in the series now.

I came home late for lunch today and decided to just stay home and work from there this afternoon.  No one needed me at the office and there is always so much to do at the house.  Liesl and Luciana are always very happy when I stay home even if they do not get a lot of chance to see me during that time.

We did a little cleaning in the house today.  My office especially is making good progress towards not being the disaster that it has been.  Still a lot more to do, but we are making progress.

What we really need to do is to paint the living room.  We have a major SpiceCorps event that is going to happen at our house in two weeks and we really want to get the living room painted before that.  And then the day after that my dad is coming down to visit so there is no chance to paint between the two events.  There is not much time to accomplish all of that between now and then, however.  The living room is the last major area of the house needing fresh paint.

I ended up working late this evening on lots of little projects.  The big one is attempting to get the server room up and running.  It has been sitting there for so long without being used except as our wiring closet and handling the one little Netgear ReadyNAS that I have stored in there.  I got one of the HP Proliant DL145 G3 units racked, stacked and powered on but did not get around to actually working on it.  I will leave that task for tomorrow.  This is my OpenSuse/Xen server platform for the house.

Tonight I started reading longer form stories for Liesl.  Traditionally we have been reading pretty short books from people like Sandra Boynton.  We would read several but each was very, very short with very little story.  Liesl is ready for something longer.   So tonight we starting reading some classics from my own childhood.  My dad bought Liesl a lot of books for her birthday and in there were a lot of classics.  The shorter ones, like the Little Golden Books, I have been introducing for a while but now we went on to books that I remember my mother reading to me when I was very little.  Liesl really liked that.

Medifast Status: Day 278, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

Liesl was much better today.  And after yesterday being a day without electronics today she used them very little even though she was no longer grounded and allowed to use them as usual.  She watched almost nothing all day and only used her LeapPad a little bit.

We didn’t do a whole lot today.  A little cleaning, a little exercising, a little just relaxing with the family.  Very low key day.

I ran out to Fry’s early this afternoon and did a little shopping.  I was there to get a power line conditioner that we need for the server room in the house.  The power has always been a problem there and Art thought that getting a line conditioner would clean it up enough to eliminate the problems.  I saw that Fry’s carried what we needed so I ran down there to get it so that I could start using the servers in the house.

On my way back from Fry’s I stopped off at Rockfish and picked up dinner.  Our meal from there is often mahi mahi in a mushroom sauce for Dominica and cedar plank salmon for myself.  Delicious.  We generally get the volcano shrimp appetizer as well to split.  It is a bit of cheating on our diet but not all that bad, all things considered.  What it is is way too expensive as Rockfish is nearly twice the cost of eating at the country club.  The country club costs about the same as just getting groceries and eating at home.  Rockfish, while not expensive, is quite expensive in comparison.

This evening Dominica decided to turn in early while I, for once not feeling tired, decided that I was going to stay up and tackle the last large project that has been sitting on my plate for sometime.  A Ruby on Rails project where the company that had original made the code and left it in a non-working state and had been unable to fix it themselves.  Not the kind of project that I typically do.

It has really been years since I have done work like this.  Back in 1994 and 1995 I spent the bulk of my workload pouring over other people’s Fortran 77 and C code looking for problems.  Not generally the most fun form of work.  It takes a lot of effort to learn someone else’s code and it is no small matter attempting to “load” that code into your brain, get a handle on how it works and then know it well enough, along with knowing how to code well enough, to repair the problem.

The disadvantage of not being the original coder is significant as I don’t know what they intended to do necessary, I don’t have access to their documentation, I don’t have the kind of time that they had or anything.  All I am doing is working from something that doesn’t work and attempting to make it into something that does work.  It is not the same as repairing something that once worked and returning it to a known state.  This is about taking something that never worked and making it do what it was intended to do, very different.  It is not a repair job, it is picking up an engineering project partway through without the resources that the original engineer had.

I ended up working solid on this coding project for many hours.  It turned out that there was a “secret” second, remote database being used that I had been told nothing about and to which I had no access so I could only derive its contents and structure from looking at bits of the code that I assumed were working properly.  I had to pull many crazy tricks like manually editing the database to create my own user so that I could test the system.

At around three in the morning I was finally able to get to the bottom of the problem and it was all resolved!  That’s an awesome feeling.  There were big obstacles to overcome and I pulled it off.  This is when IT is a lot of fun.  When you are given a serious challenge and the ability to just focus on it for a while until it is completed.  It is a real sense of accomplishment.

Medifast Status: Day 277, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

This morning we were supposed to be going to Brookhaven for our “new members introduction” meeting.  So I got up early at seven thirty and worked for a bit so that I would be able to go.  Today is a really busy day so I had to get some stuff out of the way.

While trying to get ready to go Liesl was throwing a bit of a fit and just kept getting into more and more trouble.  We finally got loaded up in the car but she wouldn’t stop and we decided that we just couldn’t make it happen.  So we unloaded the car and went back into the house.

Liesl was having such a bad day that we had to figure out something new.  I decided that she is old enough to begin to understand being grounded so today she got grounded from all of her electronics including the “television”, iPad and her LeapPad.  She understood that she was in trouble and that this was her punishment.  So this will be a big experiment for us.

Liesl ended up spending the rest of the day being perfectly wonderful.  She played quietly all day and was quite the little angel.  She spent a lot of time hanging out with us too. So the grounding seems to have worked really well.  It had a positive effect on her all day and she seems to have really understood that this was her punishment and why it was happening.  She never asked to use any of her devices all day either – so it really seems to have stuck with her.

I got a lot of work done today.  I was quite productive.  I had a lot of work that has piled up and I was determined to play some catch up and get this backlog out of the way.  I didn’t finish it all today but I got a big majority of things wiped out and I feel pretty good about it.

We’ve been watching the sitcom Melissa & Joey which isn’t great but it isn’t bad.  Very much a generic sitcom but we like the people that are in it and it is good for just having on in the background because if we miss some of it we really don’t care.  We discovered it because it was “just on” one day when we were at La Cima several months ago so we knew about it and knew that it had people that we liked so when we found it on Hulu Plus we decided to just give it a try and we have made it most of the way through the first (and so far only) season.

Medifast Status: Day 276, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

I was dragging when I pulled myself out of bed at six this morning.  I showered and got into the office for Non-Farm Payroll.  Really good numbers this morning.  Very good and far better than expected.  It would appear, at least according to unemployment, that the US economy is really making a recovery.  One good month only does so much but this was one amazing month.

Overall today was pretty slow which was great for a Friday.  I went home for lunch and just hung out.  I did not have to stay late today either.  I wasn’t home early but was home before seven, which is nice.

Dominica made dinner and we just ate at home and spent the evening together as a family.  I have a lot of work that I want to get done this weekend so even though we don’t have any big plans this is going to be one of my big “catching up” weekends although I plan to spend a lot of time with the girls since they are going to be out of town next weekend.  They are going to be going to Houston and I will be staying home – so in theory I should be able to be really productive during that time.  Just Oreo and I with nothing in particular to do although Dominica does want me to steam clean the playroom carpeting while they are gone.  It really needs it.

Medifast Status: Day 275, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

We stayed up late and I am paying the price for it today.  I am very tired and dragging heavily.  Dominica is really tired too.  It is going to be a long day.

The weather is a little cooler today but still pretty nice.  I cannot believe that we survived January without any snow at all and only about two days of frost.  Now it is February and we have been having spring weather for a week already.  We have had the windows open and no need for jackets at all.  This is wonderful.  It is odd, though, having no winter at all.  The last two years we have been in Texas but we saw snow and got that “winter feeling” which helps us to mentally reset and remember when it is.

But with zero snow and no freezing temperatures it is pretty hard as a New Yorker to wrap my brain around the fact that it is warming up already.  It just feels wrong.  There is little chance now that we will see any snow this year.  We are past the worst month and it is already so warm that it would be surprising if it went anywhere near snow temperatures after this.

Work was super slow today.  It was great.  I was in the office all day.  Went home for lunch and hung out with Liesl.  Luciana slept through me being home.  Dominica made cauliflower soup which is one of my favourite foods these days.  I love it.  Tastes so rich yet is incredibly light and healthy.

I was able to leave work right at five this evening.  In reality I could have skipped all afternoon and probably no one would have noticed.  It was really that dead.  Very strange.

On my way home this evening I finished reading Jack Kerouac’s American classic “On the Road: The Original Scroll.”  It was a lot longer than it should have been and I must say that, overall, it is one of the worst books that I have ever read.  It is written as if by a third grader who had spent some time serving in the merchant marines.  Funny enough, Kerouac had served in the merchant marines.

The book is not really a story but simply a highly descriptive, but mostly unintelligible, journal about Kerouac and his friend Neal and how they drove across the country several times in the late 1940s.  There is no plot and not a single character that would not have been improved by having been run over by a bus.  Kerouac bounces between being homeless, living in a tent or just being another random loser living in his mother’s basement.  His story generates only the slightest interest because it takes place in the 1940s, an era that I know little about and reading a journal from that period helps to put the world into a little better perspective.  But the journal of an interesting person would probably have been a lot better.

How “On the Road” became a classic I will never know.  Why anyone published it, again, I have no idea.  The book is considered the foundation of the beat movement and later the hippy movement.  But as the book is nothing but a journal about losers Kerouac and Neal Cassady and doesn’t portray them as anything but the most unflattering light and makes everything about them as poignantly pathetic as bad prose can do it is confusing how this tome could have influenced anything.  Not only does the book point out what losers these two were and the circle of friends that they had but it is also written so poorly that the writing style alone points to Kerouac as being completely unprepared even for a high school English course.  Apparently his typing skills were not too bad, however.

What makes Kerouac so sad is that he actually tried to work and even went to college hoping to be a writer.  And this is considered his best work.  There could be no greater insult to a person.

In reading a book like this about figures who were such great influences of counterculture it is amazing to learn that they were really nothing but a few homeless guys with a notepad.  There was no great purpose.  There was no plan.  There was no success.  Kerouac really was just a guy who lived with his mother who sometimes let him ride along on people’s road trips.  If he were alive today he would play World of Warcraft and never see daylight and whine to his mom that they were out of Doritos.  Neal Cassady was a small time criminal and parking lot attendant who couldn’t keep a job.  Both died, as they lived, penniless and pointless.

While I was reading about the book after having finished it, I was saddened to learn that a movie is currently being made about it.  Can any work be less deserving of being retold?  So many great works of literature to bring to the masses and this is what we come up with?

I started reading “Hot Six”, the sixth installment of the Stephanie Plum adventure books.  I need something light and well written in the wake of Kerouac’s madness.  Something coherent would be nice.  I think that Truman Capote described Kerouac best in his seminal quote on Jack: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

I did quite a bit of work this evening while we watched Tron: Legacy, the 2010 sequel to the original movie.  The movie was not very engaging and we barely paid attention to it.  It wasn’t bad, just didn’t grab us.  Dominica has never seen the original so that made it even harder for her.  I saw the original when it was new in 1982 and once again probably in the 1990s.  It has been a long time and it was hard to put that plot into perspective with this one.  I think that I have figured out how they two go together but I am still unclear.  It didn’t make much sense.

Off to bed a little early tonight.  I need to catch up for tomorrow.  Tomorrow morning is Non-Farm Payroll so I have to be in the office nice and early.